My original idea came when I was thinking about movies and how movie posters are a great medium in which to represent them. In the case of Star Wars, they tend to have many of the major characters of the particular movie in a sort of image compilation. I specifically wanted to duplicate the layout of the The Force Awakens poster because I'm excited as all hell to see it.
To recreate the poster, I used Photoshop and various pictures that I grabbed off of Google. For reference, I kept the original poster underneath so that I could align images how they were on the original. By cutting out backgrounds, adding content-aware fills, and other layer effects I did my best to recreate the official poster, but with images that pertained to Earth and human history.
I spent a lot more time on the poster than I thought I would. I tend to be very particular with details, so a lot of time was sunk into trying to get backgrounds edited out as best as possible and recreating the details of the poster. It was also a challenge in choosing exactly what images to use as I wanted to not only touch on different parts of human history, but also remain true to the specific events that inspired parts of Star Wars. I ended up having a combination of both.
http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Star_Wars_and_History
Lots of images on Google.
Lucas Films please don't sue me.
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